Enterprise Information Integration (EII)

A use case that allows data from multiple sources to be accessed like a single source. Provides a "real time" data integration scenario. For instance, you could query the data warehouse, retrieve the last few orders for a customer, and check the CRM for any open issues and assemble that data for the report.

Kettle for EII

Kettle can already be used by Pentaho reports as a source of data, achieving this functionality for users of Pentaho Reports. However, there are many other applications other than Pentaho Reporting that could use Kettle transformations in an EII deployment scenario.

Take for example the following examples:

• A custom application that needs to match up data from several sources and present the user a screen with the combined data.
• A JDBC application that wants to stream data from several physical locations into a combined dataset
• Reporting libraries and applications other than Pentaho that want to leverage the data "munging" capabilities of Kettle to prepare data for reporting (BIRT, JasperReports, iNetSoft, ...)

Basic Example

Take a VERY simple example: examplecsv.ktr

This transformation simply selects data from a CSV file, sorts it, and then by ending with a "Dummy" step does nothing with it. This is a read only transformation.

Let's have a look at the "output fields" of the output step, which is the data that we want to access via JDBC.

Using our JDBCConnection, we can execute the following SQL:

select Year, PresentsNickReceived from output

yielding the following dataset

When the JDBCDriver executes select Year, PresentsNickReceived from output the driver starts the transformation, executes it, and slurps the data on the "output" of the step used as the table name.